Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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20.6.13

Gov. Bobby
Jindal has a tough call to make on state Sen. Gary Smith’s SB
162. Proper weighing of its good and bad points, the moral import, and
public policy ramifications involved direct him to the correct decision on
whether to sign or veto this bill.

SB 162 would make surrogate motherhood contracts enforceable in
Louisiana courts for married couples. Smith argues this from his own personal experience
in the matter, saying that under the present unregulated system that couples
whether married in the state can contract for this service but the contracts
can be abrogated without penalty. Even after successful birth, then adoption
must occur as the child legally is the mother’s who bore him, costing time and
money.

Most states regulate the practice, and this version has drawn
opposition. One complaint is that it precludes unmarried couples from falling
under the new legal protection. But it makes no sense for this to occur in
anything but a marriage between one man and one woman. Same-sex unions by
definition cannot produce children, and why should the state support an attempt
between a man and a woman not married to each other when the state recognizes
and subsidizes through policy marriage as a means to reproduction?

19.6.13

Most high-profile legislation offered by north Louisiana legislators this
past session for the area and the state failed to win passage. And that’s a
good thing.

Previously
discussed here was state Rep. Henry Burns’ HB
179, which would have jacked up the occupancy tax for Caddo and Bossier
Parishes and divert those sums to touristic interests and the Advocare V100 Bowl.
There was no financial justification to kill jobs this way, and the bill was
quickly smothered in a House of Representatives committee.

However, Burns did well in getting his HB
717 passed that will make it harder for the mentally ill and felons to buy
firearms. He was joined with getting through a quality bill doubly by state
Rep. Jeff Thompson,
whose HB
8 will punish dissemination of information concerning concealed carry
weapon license holders that could make certain households more vulnerable to
crime, and whose HB
98 makes it easier to have that license across parishes.

18.6.13

Trying to rebuild the Democrat brand in Louisiana is a tough task, even
when you have an easy audience of reporters whose ideological faith by and
large has them proclaiming “hallelujah” to the task. But if this is the best
that state Rep. Walt
Leger can do, he’d better get used to being on the outside of power looking
in.

Leger, who serves as the speaker pro-tem in the Louisiana House of
Representatives, addressed the weekly exercise of capitol-area media members intended
to demonstrate their relevance by attracting newsworthy speakers, a meeting of
the Press Club of Baton Rouge. Not only his position, which makes him likely
the most powerful Democrat in state government, but also his membership as
apparently the only Democrat in the Louisiana
Budget Reform Campaign made what he had to say of some note.

And on the subject of that affiliation with the group that terms
themselves the “fiscal hawks,” Leger did have an accurate observation. He noted
the internal contradiction that existed with the group’s presumed signature
achievement during the legislative system, asserting a sharp decrease in the amount
of “one-time money” in the budget, or dollars budgeted from recurring sources
that are not from the general fund and money that comes from one-off
transactions such as property sales. The main mechanism by which to replace
these bucks, was the use
of a tax amnesty program which, as far as he was concerned, “kicked the can
down the road” and “doesn’t fix the root problem.”

17.6.13

Regrettably, Gov. Bobby Jindal
recently signed
into law what may not be technically a tax increase by law, but in spirit
is nothing more than a geographically-restricted version of a “sick tax” that
could become a self-inflicted wound across the state by 2015.

Jindal affirmed into Act
222 of 2013 SB 44 by state Sen. Ben
Nevers. The law allows the city of Bogalusa to impose as high as a six
percent “provider fee” onto delivery of health care services by a hospital,
which applies to just one entity, Bogalusa Medical Center. The intent is for
the state to be able to use this money as a basis to capture Medicaid matching
funds, a large portion of the business of the state-owned hospital that soon
will be contracted out for running likely to a religious nonprofit entity. This
would occur only after approval by Bogalusa voters, presumably at the regular
2014 election date.

The law regards this surcharge onto gross receipts as a “fee” because it
is reasonably related to the purpose it funds and given other language in the
law that states “No hospital … shall pass on the cost of the provider fee or
include the provider fee as an itemized and separately listed amount on any
statement sent to any patient, responsible party, insurer, or self-insured
employer program.” Further, “Any bill or statement sent to a patient,
responsible party, insurer, or self-insured employer program after the initial
effective date of this Subsection shall contain a statement that, ‘This bill
does not contain any cost of the provider fee levied by the city of Bogalusa’.”

16.6.13

That Louisiana barely maintains second-to-last
place among the states in terms of proportion of adult population with a
college degrees tells little about resources put into and access to higher
education but much about how those resources are deployed and how access can
occur in a deleterious way.

With only 27.9 percent having any kind of degree, over 10 points below
the national average, several reasons exist why this could be the case. One,
that not enough funding is going into the enterprise, can be dismissed quickly.
The state ranks
18th in state per capita
spending on higher education, yet ranks poorly in outcome measures such as
this one, in part because these inputs are being spread too thinly with so many
campuses of an overbuilt system.

The other reasons, which deal with how the inputs get used, reveal much
more about the nature of the problem and the solution. Until this past year,
one of these was the virtually open admissions model that existed at the lowest
tier or “regional,” universities. Before then, all a recent high school
graduate or General Equivalency Diploma holder needed to do for admittance to
at least some of these was to perform around the national average in the
American College Test, or have a better than C average in core coursework, or
to graduate in the top half of the high school class. Now,
both these averages must be achieved as well as 2.0 grade point average overall
and some require higher standards still, and universities in higher tiers even
have more stringent requirements. And these are due to increase again next
academic year.

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